UDAYA, Journal of Journal 15, 2020 UDAYA, Khmer Studies No. The Grū of Parnassus: Au Chhieng Among The Titans THE GRŪ OF PARNASSUS: AU CHHIENG AMONG THE TITANS * Grégory Mikaelian * You mean, Acis, that it is raining. Why don’t you say: it is raining?1 Nurtured on Sanskrit grammar and Sanskrit rhetoric, the Khmer past has not ceased then to explain the Khmer present, which continues it…2 Introduction Khmer specialists know his name and a dozen articles by him:3 they made an impact then and they continue to do so now. His mastery of languages, that of French and Old and Middle Khmer, but also Sanskrit and Pāli, always impresses. Even more astonishing, however, is the way he reconstructed the way of thinking of the Khmers of Ancient Cambodia and how it was updated in the Middle Period right down to contemporary times, subtly connecting up words and ideas scattered in diverse corpora. Possessing a perfect logical structure and great philological rigor, his writings are a panoply of lyrical pleas for a renewal of Khmerology, the notion of which he was * Researcher at the Centre Asie du Sud-Est (UMR 8170, CNRS/EHESS/INALCO). This article is a translation by Robert Fowler of an expanded and amended version of the text published in French in the revue Péninsule (“Le grū du Parnasse”). I am keen to thank, in particular, Sam Samphān’, Ker Osel, Lor Vichory, Lor Vicholin, Robert Heng and, more generally, all the descendants of the Au siblings for their valuable testimonies and for having given access to the family documentation, as well as Nasir Abdoul-Carime, Pascal Bourdeaux, Khing Hoc Dy, Grégory Kourilsky, Loch Chhanchhai, Angelina Martini-Jacquin, and Douc Setha for the valuable documentary help they afforded me, and Nasir Abdoul-Carime, Mathieu Guérin and Éric Bourdonneau, too, for their kind proofreading. My thanks also thanks to all the people who were kind enough to provide their personal testimony on Au Chhieng: Messrs Kama- leswar Bhattacharya (deceased), Claude Jacques (deceased), Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, Hubert de Mestier, Loch Phlèng (deceased), Son Soubert, Thiounn Mumm and Mrs Jacqueline Filliozat and Mrs Saveros Pou (deceased). The conclu- sions that I draw from the material and the testimonies are mine alone. Lastly, I should like to thank for his translation Robert Fowler, who has sometimes enabled the text to be clarified and improved. 1 Au, “Sanscrit ‘Jour de Yama’ et vieux khmer ‘Dixième jour lunaire’,” 203. 2 Ibid., 206. 3 Cf. infra, his bibliography. 127 Grégory Mikaelian the first to make use. But Khmer specialists barely know the man who looms behind the scholar. Nor, moreover, is much known about the latter, aside from a few anecdotes passed on by those who attended his classes at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. We didn’t know what he looked like, what precisely his educational background was, his role in the field of post-warKhmer studies nor, above all, why he published so little, when you have only to read a few page by this erudite man to suspect him the repository of an uncommon quantum of knowledge. Until very recently, the hypothesis of a singular misanthropy prevailed. This allegedly had driven Au Chhieng (Ū Jhīe├4) to participate on the sidelines only of the world of Khmer studies and, moreover, to hoard his knowledge rather than cast pearls before swine.5 Out of the aura of mystery surrounding him there thus emerged the possibility for an initial understanding of his personality, providing what could appear be a key to this paradoxical relationship to knowledge. Behind this misanthropy was discernible the archetypal image of the Cambodian grū, an image worthy of one of those shadow-theatre puppets with features deliberately exaggerated all the better to make the silhouette stand out in the chiaroscuro: undue severity born of his capacious knowledge, sartorial elegance and great self-restraint, rejection of the daily round of society to the point of self-withdrawal, a simon-pure savant installed on the sidelines of the by-definition corruptible academic system... a virtually mythical personage of spectral physiognomy, he consequently vegetated in the shadow of the tutelary figure of Khmer studies embodied by the historian George Cœdès (1886-1969), whose collaborator he was and whom Cœdès consulted when he struggled with a challenging text.6 Then, during research into the colonial period, a personal drama was discovered that was perhaps the origin of this misanthropy: a doctorand in law in 1941, his thesis was pulped by the police chief of Paris owing to its subversive nature (cf. infra) before he was rescued by the milieu of Orientalists, which eventually found him a small place in the academic system teaching Khmer philology, but in conditions that were always precarious.7 Bitterness and self-withdrawal appear then as an altogether natural consequence of this decisive event. They bear witness, however, less to a social pathology than to an affectation: deliberate withdrawal in the face of dominant forces. This internal exile appeared, then, paradoxical. While 4 This article contains two forms of transcription for names, the commonly accepted one and the scientific one, as follows: 1) the most common names, such as Norodom or Sutharot, are given in the most common transliteration; 2) the known names which are more directly the object of this biographical enquiry, like Au Chhieng or Au Chhoeun, are given in the most common transcription as well as, on first occurrence, their transliterated form, between brackets (Ū Jhīe├, Ū Jhīoen); 3) all other names are given in scientific transliteration; 4) the exceptions to this are names whose spelling we do not know with certainty owing to their absence in Khmer in the sources read, and which will also be found in simple common transcription only. 5 Personal communication of Mrs Saveros Pou. 6 George Cœdès, whose biography we are only beginning to know thanks to one of his descendants. See Cros, “George Cœdès, la vie méconnue d’un découvreur de royaumes oubliés.” 7 Cf. Singaravélou, Professer l’Empire, 105-108. 128 UDAYA, Journal of Journal 15, 2020 UDAYA, Khmer Studies No. UDAYA, Journal of Journal 15, 2020 UDAYA, Khmer Studies No. The Grū of Parnassus: Au Chhieng Among The Titans he could easily find cultural justifications in the figure of the Cambodian grū, this aloofness was also the arena for the waging of a metapolitical combat characteristic this time of the European scholarly world: the knowledge that Au Chhieng sparingly dispensed, despite or through this withdrawal, radically challenged the idea of a cultural break between the ancient Khmer civilization and contemporary Cambodia, the largely ideological break on which colonial domination was built.8 This new information raised, moreover, singular questions about the scholar’s biography: while it enabled you to understood much better the rigor of his demonstrations in the field of Khmer studies, which were clearly informed by his legal training, it nonetheless raised a question about this unexpected period of law studies and the link between them and his Orientalist studies. Two courses of study with divergent potential outcomes —one adapted to action in the world while the second is more easily accompanied by a meditative attitude— which afforded an insight into a tension constitutive of Au Chhieng’s very personality prior to the dramatic episode of 1941. Having carried out further research in different archival holdings —the Archives de Paris, the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), the Archives Nationales du Cambodge (ANC), the archives of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) and the Fonds François Martini— as well as a field survey in Au Chhieng’s home neighbourhood in Battambang in July 2018, and, more recently, a survey of members of his family living in France, the United States and Canada, I shall present here previously unpublished material which makes it possible to offer both a better- documented and more nuanced reading of his social origins (I), his career (II & III) and his work (IV) which also serves, I hope, to explain his paradoxical position in the field of Khmer Studies, central in some ways, but marginal in others (conclusion). I. IN THE CRUCIBLE OF THE SECOND-TIER ARISTOCRACY OF BATTAMBANG A regional elite of underestimated sociopolitical weight The provincial origins of Au Chhieng provide an initial lead to understanding his positioning in the landscape of the Cambodian elites of his time, although it is not always easy to give an account of them. While the singular weight of the Khmer Krom has been the object of particular attention in the historiography,9 there has been a lack of similar attention paid to the people of Battambang, even though it is quite clear that they represent the other major regional component of the land of the Khmers in the 20th Century. Easily identifiable by their names, and, what’s more, demanding,10 the Khmer Krom are sometimes considered the heirs of a “Funan tradition”, which does, whatever one might think, have 8 Mikaelian, “L’aristocratie khmère à l’épreuve des humanités françaises.” 9 Népote, “Combien sont les Khmers Krom?;” Engelbert, “The Enemy Needed;” Mikaelian, “Bref aperçu sur la ques- tion khmère krom.” 10 Engelbert, “The Enemy Needed.” 129 Grégory Mikaelian the advantage of placing this population of the Mekong Delta in the long history of Cambodia;11 with a dash of Sino-Vietnamese modernity12 and, on that account, favoured intermediaries between the local authorities and the French bureaucracy, they were placed early on in the service of the colonial administrators.13 Hence their relative visibility in the sources, especially colonial ones, and the fact that you can quite easily spot the Khmer Krom component in cultural or political movements ranging from the Buddhist Institute to the Khmer Rouge, including the Issaraks, the Khmer Serei and the cadres of the Republic.